Paul Almond's site has many philosophically deep articles on theoretical rationality along LessWrongish assumptions, including but not limited to some great atheology, an attempt to solve the problem of arbitrary UTM choice, a possible anthropic explanation why space is 3D, a thorough defense of Occam's Razor, a lot of AI theory that I haven't tried to understand, and an attempt to explain what it means for minds to be implemented (related in approach to this and this).
Thanks for joining the discussion, PaulUK/Paul Almond. (I'll refer to you with the former.)
Well, then I'm going to apply Occam's razor back onto this. If you require a 10^21+1 bit program to extract a known 10^21 bit program, we should prefer the explanation:
a) "You wrote a program one bit too long."
rather than,
b) "You found a naturally occurring instance of a 10^21 bit algorithm that just happens to need a 10^21+1 bit algorithm in order to map it to the known 10^21 bit algorithm."
See the problem?
The whole point of explaining a phenomenon as implementing an algorithm is that, given the phenomenon, we don't need to do the whole algorithm separately. What if I sold you a "computer" with the proviso that "you have to manually check each answer it gives you"?
Either name is fine (since it is hardly a secret who I am here).
Yes, I see the problem, but this was very much in my mind when I wrote all this. I could have hardly missed the issue. I would have to accept it or deny it, and in fact I considered it a great deal. It is the first thing you would need to consider. I still maintain that there is nothing special about this algorithm length. I actually think your practical example of buying the computer, if anything counts against it. Suppose you sold me a computer and it "allegedly" ran a program 10^2... (read more)